Image Recognition And the Potential for Mobile Shopping

With the rise of mobile and seperately visual social networks like Pinterest and Instagram, image recognition becomes more relevant to E-commerce. Not only can it help target those social networks which are a perfect fit for mobile screens. This technology can also help bring the cameras of smartphones into the mix.

Curalate, an image recognition tech startup, just raised $27.5 million in a series C round. The startup calls itself a “visual commerce platform used by hundreds of the world’s most loved brands.” TechCrunch:

Since Curalate is a suite of visual commerce tools rather than a single product, what the company actually does can seem a bit nebulous. Here’s a quick breakdown of what Curalate offers:

Like2Buy – Turns the one link in a brand’s Instagram profile into a gateway to buy products from any of their Instagram posts.

Fanreel – Pulls in user-generated images to a brand’s website and applies image recognition to tag products to show so they’re easy to buy.

Visual Insights – Generates analytics about which of a brand’s products are being shared in images on Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and other networks so businesses know what’s hot

Reveal – Makes images on a business’ website shoppable by tagging the products in them and linking them to detail and purchase pages.

image recognition holds a lot of potential in general and for fashion specifically (hold your smartphone camera at the TV, a fashion magazine etc. and get the clothes captured),

Zalando is on the verge of transforming into a pervasive fashion platform trying to cover everything fashion

and that Zalando has a lot of cash in the bank thanks to its IPO

..it is surprising that Zalando is not aquiring startups in this field.

Amazon has image recognition in its main mobile apps since 2014. It bought an image recognition startup in 2009. With X-Ray Amazon shows what can be done in a vertically integrated offering today beyond just image recognition. (The latter being more about getting information from the outside in. While X-Ray is a combination of already internal but separate parts and metadata to create context and opportunities for shopping.)